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Michel Faber: written to distraction

The author penned his latest novel against a backdrop of personal crisis

We are sitting in The Crimson Petal as we speak," says Michel Faber, gesturing around the bare kitchen of his flat close to The Meadows in Edinburgh, a flat with a manly nimbus of domestic non-observance and pine seats that squeak tortuously in response to every movement on them.

What he means is that this is the flat The Crimson Petal paid for. His 2002 novel, properly titled The Crimson Petal and the White, was a grand, post-feminist update of the Dickensian doorstop and a freakish global bestseller for Faber, an expansive 835-page landmark on the landscape of a writer better known as a literary miniaturist.

But the fruit of its success is a flat in which, clearly, a man lives alone. There are English-language copies and foreign translations of his own books strewn around and, in the absence of the statutory cup of coffee, Faber has the distracted, apologetic